Built to Last: Architecture, Memory, and the Imaginary Atrium. Works by Alicja Habisiak-Matczak & Alex R.M. Thompson

Built to Last: Architecture, Memory, and the Imaginary Atrium. Works by Alicja Habisiak-Matczak & Alex R.M. Thompson

November 21 - December 16, 2023

FAB Gallery, Second Floor

Reception

University of Alberta faculty, staff, students and invited guests
Thursday November 23,  2023 | 7-9 pm | FAB Gallery

About the Show

Initiated by Marilène Oliver and generously funded by the Wirth Institute, Built to Last: Architecture, Memory, and the Imaginary Atrium is the result of a productive exchange between The Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland, and the University of Alberta. Brought together by a mutual fascination with the built environment and its expression through print media, Alicja Habisiak-Matczak and Alex R.M. Thompson each spent time exploring the city that the other calls home during May and June of 2023. The work that arises from this exchange of tools, knowledge, and urban experience dwells in the atrium, a space between eventual destinations filled with fleeting possibilities, moments of meeting, and cursory glances. 

For Thompson, this took the form of considering the history of the textile industry in Lodz and the architecture that housed its vastly growing workforce during the industrial revolution. Experiments in frottage, heat-set sublimation dyes on fabric, lithography, and etching aluminum with copper sulfate, along with lengthy pedestrian exploration of the city, dominated Thompson’s time in Poland. Likewise, Habisiak-Matczak explored the utopic placelessness of Edmonton’s mall atria and the University of Alberta’s extensive campus, working with a CO2 laser to translate her drawings into woodcut and plexiglass engraving prints, as well as sculptural works whose forms resemble miniature architectural inventions. Each artist dwells on the lingering spaces of temporary grandeur, points of meeting, gathering, conversation, and brief respite from the conditions of the outside world. In their selection of sources and subjects, the artists channel a sense of hopeful optimism in the ability of spaces to accommodate a range of needs and demands, nuanced by the ever-present economic mechanisms and cultural priorities within urban architecture.

Both artists hybridize and modify the existing built environment, playing with light and shadow to create spaces adjacent to the real, ready to welcome occupants who will in turn reshape them to fit their needs and desires.

About the Artists

Alex R.M. Thompson’s body of print- and installation-based work interrogates the structures of power and processes of land use that shape the contemporary world we occupy. His prints are monochromatic fabrications, using monumental, institutional, and infrastructural architecture to create hypothetical cityscapes from existing buildings. Through the process of combining disparate places, he illustrates spaces that are simultaneously plausible, familiar, and forlorn. Recognizable structures emerge outside of their contexts, looming above empty streets that do not exist. The inter-reliant nature of urban areas and the compression of distance as technology connects cities underpin Thompson’s methods of creative generation, leading to reflections on architecture embracing its timeliness/timelessness. He has exhibited at galleries in Canada and abroad, including The Power Plant (Toronto), The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Galleri Hieke Arndt (Berlin), Akademia Sztuki Pięknych (Łódź, Poland), and the Gladstone House (Toronto), and has instructed various print techniques at Open Studio (Toronto), OCAD University (Toronto), and the University of Alberta (Edmonton). Originally from Brantford, ON, he holds a BFA from OCAD University, and a MFA from the University of Alberta. He currently teaches at the University of Alberta as an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Art & Design, as a printmaking Instructor at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists (SNAP), and maintains a creative studio practice.

Alicja Habisiak-Matczak’s prints, drawings, and print objects strive to capture the whirling and frenetic movement of the world around us. Drawing on existing places, such as Łódź, Urbino, Buenos Aires, Edmonton, she invites the viewer to enter architecture in constant motion, towards the horizon or deeper into her labyrinths. These environments, modified by imagination, memories, and a personal sense of perspective, evoke Piranesi or the Futurists. Repetition, exaggeration, and the connection of seemingly strange elements into new wholes enables an expression of Boccioni’s concept of simultaneous states of the soul.

Alicja Habisiak-Matczak studied at the Faculty of Graphics and Painting at the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts Łódź, Poland (1997 - 2002), before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, Italy (2003-04). She started teaching at the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts, receiving her PhD (2009) and a postdoctoral degree (2015). In 2016 she became the Head of the Intaglio Techniques Studio, researching non-toxic copper sulphate and electrolytical etching. In 2013 she initiated International Summer Courses of Artistic Printmaking (PATA) alongside Giuliano Santini, coordinating 8 editions. Her exhibition record includes 35 solo exhibitions in Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, Argentina, Canada, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and UK, and over 280 national and international group exhibitions, including in Sarcelles, Trois Rivieres, Cairo, New York, Ottawa, Rome, Acqui Terme, Varna, Douro, Kyoto and Tokyo. She has won 16 awards across Europe and North America, and participated in international printmaking conferences such as Impact 10 (2018), and has curated over 80 exhibitions.

 

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